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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges.

In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.

Seriously, it seemed like a revolutionary concept when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?." Or that (absent computer labs) I could bring a cup of coffee or bottle of soda with me to class, and that common etiquette even allowed for a bit of food if it wasn't noisy to eat or have a powerful smell.

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When I was eight years old I had a teacher who told us that if we needed to use the bathroom, rather than ask "can I use the bathroom?" we should instead say "I'm going to the bathroom". She said she would never stop us from going, but that we should at least let her know why we're leaving the room.

I never got to experience that again at school after I left the second grade.

I like her. Last time I taught HS I told my students that I would never deny them the right to go to the bathroom, but that if they went more than three times in a week (or something) I would send a note to the nurse so she could discuss a possible health issue with them and their parents.

Going to the bathroom more than three times a week means they have a health issue? Seems a bit heavy-handed. Lots of kids get bullied and would rather go to the bathroom during class when no one else is in the bathroom. At some point, it becomes routine so it makes sense that you would go to the bathroom during the same class. That said, my world history class in high school was so boring, I would ask to go to the bathroom and just walk around the school for 10 minutes. It was a couple hours after lunch, so it made sense that I was going number 2.

No, it doesn't "mean they have a health issue", and I didn't say that it did. Part of the teacher's job is to look for signs of abuse, bullying, and health problems. I'm not a doctor. I see a possible symptom, I'll bring it to the attention of people who can help. If they are using the bathroom frequently because they are being bullied then I am exactly doing my job in the best way possible by alerting the nurse, who can alert the counselor, etc.

Getting bullied so much you're afraid to use the bathroom may not be a health issue, but it sure is an issue. If I was a parent I would want to know if that was happening.

Why would you do that? That doesn't seem very trusting of your students. People need to go to the bathroom several times a day, there's no reason to think that needing to go to the bathroom in your class is an indication of a health issue.

Good question. I tried to treat my students as adults, to the occasional chagrin of the administration, as much as possible. I definitely did not trust them—I knew too much—but I tried to pretend that I did. So my ploy was to discourage the students who would otherwise go hang out in the bathroom every single class. Of course one needs to go several times per day. But that does not translate to every time my class meets.

For my context here, I went to a high school that was centered around progressive education principles and I never had to ask to go to the bathroom. There were no disciplinary policies like that. And in fact, everything was fine. We all still worked hard, paid attention, and got our diplomas. I think too many teachers assume students are all malicious gremlins trying as hard as they can to avoid school. Turns out, most adults will start to chafe too if you tell them they have to ask to go to the bathroom after the third time doing so in your presence, let alone if you make them ask every time. And some adults will even use bathroom breaks as an excuse to waste time.

So be it! That's life.

Your school sounds like the sort of place that would select for well behaved children whose parents had the ability and wherewithal to select a progressive school. I don't think policies like that work in schools filled to the brim with students who absolutely do not care about school in the slightest.

People who absolutely do not care about school and don’t want to be there are unlikely to attain much benefit from school. I think this is true no matter how much you try to force them to pay attention, punish them for skipping, leaving class regularly or simply daydreaming while ignoring the instructor. There just isn’t much use imposing the will of an authority on someone who has their own free will which isn’t aligned and doesn’t want to be dominated. In my opinion, success at that sort of endeavor should not be celebrated. A student should only be in school if they want to be there.

Perhaps, but the policies we do have in the US pretty clearly do not work either. Beyond that I think treating children in a humanist fashion is an ethical obligation we hold as adults, but this perspective is apparently quite radical.

>> I think too many teachers assume students are all malicious gremlins trying

It only takes a few to ruin it for everybody.

Look, I’m with you (although nothing can be “centered around” anything). But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.

>nothing can be “centered around” anything

Not quite sure what you're getting at here but insofar as progressive education was an explicit philosophy reflected in policies and actions, it was centered.

>But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.

No disagreement there, and I'm sorry to hear you got fired. I'm sure your students appreciated you doing your part to make things less shitty.

It was “centered on” those things, not “around”.

Ah! Perhaps if my English teacher had been more of a hardcore disciplinarian...

I'm not going to assume anything because it may have just been what you told the children, but if you actually sent notes to the nurse without talking to a kid beforehand, you're definitely overstepping.

It's perfectly normal for bowel movements to be on a schedule. If a student it leaving your class multiple time per week then have a discussion to see what's going on, you might learn something about their life that paints them in a new light. Or, maybe discuss the possibility of going before class starts if possible.

I think people are downvoting your original comment because referring a student directly to the nurse is a strange thing to threaten upfront.

I did in fact talk to them beforehand, and only sent two notes in two years.

Kids abuse this, I went to an upper middle class Catholic school for middle school, and even there, bathrooms breaks were used as an excuse to go hang out in the bathroom and ultimately culminated in what amounted to a daily fight club, where there was a sense of honor if you got knocked out

That is ridiculous, and exactly the problem I remember from middle school (by high school the teachers had loosened up). 50% of your students are girls experiencing menstruation for the first time. Speaking from experience, in the first few years it pops up by surprise, or use go through pads (teenagers use pads instead of tampons generally, and they go bad more quickky) quicker than you expect. And since you normally change your pad in the morning before school, there’s a fixed window when you need to change it again.

Again speaking from experience, there’s nothing more humiliating than leaving a bloody mark in your desk because your teacher limits bathroom passes. And even if you think that you would make an exception, many well-behaved students won’t speak up, hoping they can make it to the next class. If you’re ‘enlightened’ enough to let your students go to the bathroom three times a week, you’re enlightened enough to call the truants on their BS without penalizing the rest of the class.

In Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn notes that denying prisoners the right to go to the bathroom during lengthy interrogations was a standard tactic, and a surprisingly effective one. The shame of soiling ourselves is so deeply ingrained in us that many people will confess to things they didn't do just to avoid it, even when they know the consequence is years in the Gulag.

Yeah I got kicked out of class once in high school (affecting my attendance) because I couldn't hold it until the end of the class, the teacher said no, and my choice was between disobeying or whipping my dick out and peeing on the floor.

I of course chose disobeying, but I'm pretty sure that the teacher would be far less strict in the future if I went the other route.

"I didn't get into college because I had to use the bathroom during class a lot" - no one, ever

Just turn on your voice recorder and go.

I don't know about how things usually are because my kids aren't in HS yet, but I do know that their school district, during distance learning, has a blanket policy that parents are not allowed to record the teaching sessions. So I wouldn't be too surprised if voice recorders aren't allowed in many schools as well.

It sounds like that policy needs to be broken as thoroughly and consistently as possible, provided that you are in a one-party consent state.

I can't imagine any good reason for that policy other than covering for terrible people.

> provided that you are in a one-party consent state

Is there an expectation of privacy in a public school classroom?

I'm no lawyer, but if I had to bet, I would assume that the wiretapping laws that would no doubt zealously be applied to such a recording event (if it ruffled the right feathers) wouldn't have an exception for that, as they were written before even speakerphones came into wide use.

Sometimes, breaking the rules is the only way to obtain real evidence. ;)

Who said I didn't get into college? Not every country works like the US, attendance has nothing to do with college admission.

The latter could have gotten you in some serious trouble. Better and more effective to just go in your pants.

Yeah, because students won't turn that into your permanent nickname mr. peepeepants.

They will, but you won't have to register as a sex offender. Major difference in life outcomes.

What crack are you smoking? You simply get up and walk to the restroom like any normal person would. Teachers can largely be ignored, if they physically do anything to you it's lawsuit time.

Depends on your school, class, and colour

No you can sue them in pretty much all cases if they put their hands on your kid.

I think you are dreaming.

Have you done that? Sue the powerful (a school board) from a position of powerlessness (black working class in the ghetto)? Probably not, unfair question. Do you really think it is a realistic prospect? Really?

There are toll-free hotlines for reporting teachers engaging in child abuse.

Obstructing a child from using the bathroom who needs to is a form of abuse. If that teacher then physically restrains or otherwise contacts/touches the child to prevent them, especially if it culminates in their wetting/soiling themselves, this starts resembling something along the lines of sexual abuse.

If there's one thing the USA can be relied on it's both society and the law leaning heavily in the direction of protecting the children, to a fault.

This situation is literally just a phone call away from completely ruining the teacher's career if not life.

Have you any data for how well that works for poor black children?

I hear people with theories, but child services the world over are famous for nice theories and systematic abuse. Especially for minority and poor children

So could the former because where I'm from there's a certain amount of times you can not be in a class (without a doctor's note that justifies it) before you face expulsion. IIRC that number is around 20 classes per school year, so that alone brought me to 1/20th of an expulsion.

And being the teen that I was, it's not like I had an otherwise perfect attendance in any of my high school years.

One of my favorite memories of high school was making guacamole in my physics class. I finished the exam early and had some spare time. Lunch was at 1:30pm and I had breakfast 5:40am most mornings. The teacher walked over, grabbed a chip, scooped up some of the guac, and munched on it. "Luck for you, that's really good. Otherwise I'd kick you out of class"

Yes, meal times for kids in school are also poorly structured, often dictated by over-crowded facilities that can't hold enough people to let everyone eat at a normal lunch time. My kids' school starts at 8:50 am, but one of them has lunch 11:00 a.m. with 4 hours afterwards during which they can't eat. We let him bring a snack and tell him to let his teacher know his parents gave him permission to eat, and they should contact us if there's a problem. Though last year he also had a teacher who recognized the problem and had an unofficial "snack time". Plenty of teachers are not arbitrary & capricious in their rule making.

Although it might make sense to do some research about all this snacking all the time. It seems that while in the 50ies people ate 2-3 times a day nowadays its more like 6-8 times a day and we have a huge epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

4 hours without food seems very short, it only would be a problem if the main food source would be fast carbs which let the blood sugar drop very quickly afterwards.

I'm 5'7" and 130lbs (so not fat) and I definitely can't go four hours between meals. I get very angry.

>> I get very angry

Freudian slip?

This is a phenomena common enough to have its own word: hangry

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hangry

..and I just learned the word is over a century old, it's definitely not new slang.

being hungry can make you grumpy

You should eat 6-8 times a day but smaller meals to prevent obesity. You should also avoid carbs in a majority of your meals and added sugars in all meals. Stick to healthy fats and the obesity problem reduces to none.

Obesity comes from ultimately consuming more calories than calories exerted. Your body learns (maybe this is the wrong word) to store fats when there are long periods of time without eating

I strongly disagree with the 6-8 times, my strategy is one meal a day and it seems to work much better for me.

I strongly agree with the avoiding carbs and sticking to healthy fats and that it reduces the obesity problem to none.

I definitely agree that obesity comes from consuming more calories that exerting.

I strongly disagree that fat gets stored when you don't eat for a longer time. The exact opposite is the case, nothing can be stored when you don't eat. When you rise blood sugar the body releases insulin which is the fat storage hormone. So the less often you do it the less fat gets stored.

Authoritarianism in schools sucks, but bathroom privileges aren't a great comparison.

In the US, most prisons have an open, bare toilet in the cell shared by a few cell mates. Even if one can technically use it whenever, according to what @throwaway998662 says, in practice this means you can only crap during the 1-2 hours a day when your cell mate(s) are gone.

Yeah, you could get a capricious teacher that says "no" when you ask, but that doesn't seem like much in comparison to the degradation and potential for violence of using the toilet in prison...

I remember sitting in third grade class, red in the face, hand patiently up in the air for minutes straight, simultaneously crying and pissing myself in my chair while Tiffany pointed and laughed at me with her bright red cheeks!

I was a good kid!

If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.

There is a middle ground between passive and aggressive called assertive. That is what one should aim for.

The world chews up and spits out good kids. I vowed early on that I wouldn't let anyone shit on me again and it really shaped my early life, not necessarily for the better. I overshot assertive by a decent margin.

Fortunately, I eventually settled into a healthy middle ground. I do wonder if there is a method of preparing "good kids" for the world of shit they are about to encounter in a manner that is a net benefit to them (ie. Not scarred or jaded by it). Not that I'm ever having kids.

Unfortunately, through much of school "assertive" is interpreted as "aggressive" and punished. I would classify it as assertive if a student, after raising their hand without results for a minute, said they had to go to the bathroom & then got up & went to the bathroom.

The teacher on the other hand might decide it was time for a trip to the principal's office & call home to parents because the student caused a disruption to the class by leaving without permission.

If a teacher did this to my kids I would be outraged. It's bad enough they have to wear a school uniform.

I have the same experience. I also overshot "assertive," but the alternative was that everyone would continue to steamroll me to the point of despair. Assertive wasn't enough to safeguard my dignity.

It is indeed exactly as you said. The world chewed me up for being innocent. I was routinely physically assaulted at school. These things were passed off as roughhousing or joking and the adults never intervened, and some even seemed to appreciate the "humor."

The adults rolled their eyes at me essentially for being weak, it was sort of like "sigh, what are we gonna do with that kid?" It occurs to me now that these were bitter, jaded people who hated a child for his naiveté.

If I defended myself, I was the bad guy. At some point I thought: "it doesn't make sense that I am the one who is right and that everyone else is wrong, so maybe I should be more like those guys." But then I got punished too. For example, it was considered funny for people to kick me in the balls at times. It had happened to me 10+ times and nobody got punished. Regrettably, I did it once to another kid and it was a scandal and I got punished.

I am in a healthy place now but I thank God I got through the teen and young adult years without becoming a criminal. I think I easily could have, because I came out of school a deeply damaged individual.

School was pretty good about letting kids go to the bathroom. I only remember one or two times that people were denied (they were misbehaving).

There was one time a kid got denied wrongfully because the teacher thought he was part of a group that was causing trouble right before that. He had a half-empty Gatorade bottle in his backpack from lunch... he was sitting in the back of class and chugged it while the teacher wasn't looking. He then refilled it with a different yellow liquid, if you know what I mean. I'm a bit surprised the teacher didn't catch him and that nobody freaked out and snitched.

I know it is bad for kids, but it really sucked as a teacher, too.

I substitute taught for a few years after college, and you can't leave the classroom at all except during your prep period. It was really bad some days.

I did weekend classes in elementary school which were two hours, during which our teacher would not let us go to the bathroom. Parents eventually complained and so in exchange for being able to go pee, we were no longer permitted water during the two hours.

Comments here suggest you're in the majority with your experience, though I wonder if there might be a little participation bias with regard to strong memories of such bad policies.

As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.

Things seem to have changes for the better since my time: How old are you? < 30? I have two kids in grammar school right now & they no longer face this same type of issue, but I also don't know if that's a local change or a more general re-think on students' biological needs.

30 on the dot, but my school was pretty liberal/progressive/what-have-you, so that may have helped. Hopefully considering those needs is more commonplace now, and folks won't have horror stories in the future.

That sounds like a very similar policy to the one the parent described. Essentially, it's up to the teacher to decide. Unless they codified what "abuse the privilege" meant, you're still at the mercy of a teacher's whims.

I'd say "judgment" rather than the significantly more loaded "whims", but you're right, the policy still relies on a human arbiter.

A codified system is bound to introduce problems: 'You get one bathroom break during class per week, and you've used yours, but this is an emergency? Sorry, I trust you, but the system says I have to give you detention if you go.'

My point was that the problem was with GP's specific (though perhaps commonplace) school culture/teachers, not the general idea of requiring permission.

> In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission [...]

Uhm. Where in the world do you live?! :O

The US. It's not a very dignified setup in prison with 4 people in a cell, but most prisons have a toilet and a sink in each cell.

How can you possibly square "four people living in a cell with an open toilet" with "you can poop whenever you want"?

Is this something that is merely against prison taboos, or would agreeable people in this situation also decide, "It's better for us all to have to hold our poop 23 hours a day than to just bow to the indignity and go when we need to go?" I'm anosmic so for me it would be a no brainer that you go when you need to. The toilet's right there.

Prison food probably means you have to break the taboo some days no matter what.

The US, I'd expect. It's very common here, you can generally expect kids to get a lecture, at minimum, if they leave the classroom for any reason without permission.

FWIW This was also my experience in Australia.

I had the same college experience. I nearly raised my hand to request permission but saw other kids just leaving class (sophomores I think)

I'm an assistant professor and every year some student will indeed ask if they can go to the bathroom...

I've been an adjunct professor and received that question too. My response is generally "You're the customer here. In my class, you can literally do anything you want if it doesn't interfere with other students learning or me teaching."

Not in the US and not a recent story, but there was a professor in my university who called out a noisy student telling him something in the like of "if you're bored with my lecture, you can do like these guys (pointing at students who were reading comics) and read in silence, or you can just leave, but can you not prevent others from listening?". The funny part is that the ones reading comics thought they were doing it unnoticed.

I might have been one of those. It took me years to fully internalize that university classes, despite superficial similarity, aren't run by high school rules.

In my experience it depended on the class.

Business school classes were very much like high school, at least the ones I took (I was not a business major). Assigned seats, attendance taken, etc. Don't recall if bathroom trips needed permission as I always handled that before class started.

Math and science classes were generally much more informal. Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not. I would occasionally sit in on other classes I was considering taking, to see if I liked the instructor.

> Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not

At my university, attendance at lectures and tutorials was optional and no attendance was taken (for most subjects). Most people went to the lectures but attendance at tutorials was much more mixed. I tended to skip tutorials a lot.

I remember one year I promised myself "This year I'm going to turn up to everything". So I went to the first tutorial for one of my CS subjects. The tutor asked us "Is there anything you didn't understand from the lecture?" We all said "No". He said, "Then why did you bother coming to the tutorial?"

Then he told us he was trying to teach himself quantum physics as an excuse to not work on his PhD thesis. He asked us if anyone knew quantum physics. One guy in the class was a physics major and offered to give the tutor a quantum physics lesson. The rest of us just left. And the tutor would have put that down on his timesheet and got paid for it.

I didn't bother going to any more tutorials for that subject.

In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.

> In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.

Might be good you didn't. I obviously don't know the particulars here, but I've learned that the attitude of the university teaching staff can be confusing because of non-obvious job reasons.

At my university, there was this PhD having labs with us who I liked - she seemed one of the smarter and wiser of the people I've dealt with up to that point. A year or two after those classes, we ended up having a discussion about upcoming changes in the curriculum. I asked if she'll still be running the same labs she did with us, at which point she almost burst into tears and said something like, "oh god I hope not". I was perplexed by it, until she explained to me that she never wanted these labs, she was forced by her superiors to run them, and they are completely unrelated to the domain of her research. That insight made me understand several other cases of PhDs and professors that seemed incompetent and/or disinterested - it's not that they were bad or stupid; it's because the university mismanaged them into teaching things entirely outside their domain.

I will sometimes still announce "I'm going to the bathroom" at work. Not because anyone needs to know, but because it has been so wholly ingrained. I'm just glad I don't impulsively ask for permission.

It's so weird because we go from being treated like children one year, to being treated like adults the next. There's no in-between.

In the UK in sixth form (the two years prior to university) - speaking from my own experience only of course - we would generally come and go as at university, the only difference being that the teacher might question it, (in contrast to lecturers never caring, at least not in a disciplinary or educational sense) in which case 'just going to the loo/getting a coffee miss' was fine. That's about as in between as I can imagine.

A few months ago I heard of a school in Berlin that removed toilet paper from the bathrooms and forced kids to go to the janitor to get their three sheets of toilet paper per day. And as icing on the cake the janitor didn't acknowledge that teenage girls need more paper than boys.

This story aired in TV and probably it's no longer the case. Also it likely bends the truth a bit, but nevertheless this is so unsettling and absurd that I wanted to share it.

The teacher faces the same problem. Taxi/bus drivers have the same problem.

A few things:

1) Adult bladders are larger, we're more experienced in judging the severity of our needs so we're unlikely to hold it to the point of physical injury. In kids, especially when they've been trained to artificially "hold it in" by schools, they become less sensitized to their needs and can develop problems ranging from UTI's to incontinence.

2) Teachers went to the bathroom all of the time when I was in school, they'd pull the school nurse, or a secretary, or teacher's assistant from somewhere to watch the class for a few minutes.

3) Taxi drivers can stop in between trips.

4a) Bus drivers on long-hauls can stop at rest stops, and do so regularly both for themselves & their passengers.

4b) Apart from city buses, many buses (like Greyhounds) have a bathroom on board so a rest stop isn't even required, just a pull off to the side of the road & take their keys with them to the back of the bus

4c) Buses that run frequent stop local routes, There's generally a place to go at each end of the route, but there is actually employer abuse in this area with schedules so tight and penalties for running behind schedule meaning the have a place to go is only one of the concerns. Wearing adult diapers isn't uncommon, and transit unions routinely fight for bathroom rights. But this awful situation for a certain group of workers is not at all a justification for inflicting similar constraints on other people, much less children with developing bodies.

I've been on a city bus several times when the driver just pulled over, turned off the engine, said "I'm going to the bathroom", entered the business he'd parked in front of, and came back after a couple of minutes. It didn't cause a problem, so municipalities who don't allow that are abusive. I'm sure that in general drivers try to keep that to a minimum.

But often there's too few bathrooms for too many children, so they can't go in those five minutes when they're supposed to. That was my experience at least.

The "Why didn't you go to the bathroom during lunch? \n The bathroom during lunch: " memes all have a grain of truth.

> Seriously, it seemed like a revolutionary concept when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."

Well it’s not like you have to be there at all, so no ones going to care why you get up and leave.

Little freedoms like this, and just being treated like a sane, rational human being were the difference between me doing horribly in school and not giving a shit about anything and excelling in school and loving learning. Plus, for some reason having the freedom to fail and having nobody care made an entire world of a difference for me and was the reason I grew to love academics and learning.

Prison maybe, but don’t forget about jails. I’ve visited jails in panopticon “pod” setups for 40–50-ish people bunked two-each in rooms with no bars (just a painted line dividing cells from common areas) that had a single separate common restroom/shower where each trip must be requested and approved. San Francisco’s jail is like that.

In the US, jury duty can have issues with bathroom rights also. In many places everything must stop when any juror is out of the room.

That's because everyone needs to be present for the evidence. It protects the accused. You can't have someone skip out on the exculpatory stuff.

It is a matter of dealing with the lowest common denominator I guess.

> meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.

In grade school, every time someone asks permission to use the bathroom they stop the flow of the lesson and valuable time is lost. In college the idea is that most of the students are responsible enough to handle the bathroom and food.

That's not a strong argument for strict bathroom rules. That's an argument for guidelines that don't require explicit permission: let kids go any time they want, and they silently signal it by holding up 2 fingers as they get up & go.

And how much valuable time is lost here, weighed against the extreme distraction a student has if they can't go? Besides, once the student has raised their hand and been called on, the flow is already disrupted. Answering "yes" or "no" is irrelevant at that point.

Do you have a proposal that both meets biological needs and doesn't run the minor risk of disruption? Disruptions occur constantly anyway every time a student asks a questions when they don't understand, even when most others do.

I simply fail to see how "stop the flow of the lesson" is either very relevant to unpreventable biological needs, or an unsolvable problem in its own right.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing that students shouldn't have to ask permission. It does interrupt the lesson, after all, and does very little besides reinforcing in children an obedience to authority, even above their own basic biological needs.

When I was in elementary school, we were told to try to use the bathroom after lunch, or during recess. This was teaching how to plan for what you needed to do and use the opportunities you had to get it done. You had four or five times a day when you could go to the bathroom without needing to be excused from class.

It was actually harder in high school because other than lunch, you had minimal passing time between classes (just a few minutes) so if you stopped to go to the bathroom there was a good chance you'd be late to your next class. And of course no recess. Lunch and P.E. were the two chances you had per day to use the bathroom without having to ask.

I'm all for teaching personal responsibility & planning at a very young age, but I draw the line at expecting control over autonomic functions.

It's fine to ask kids to go when there's specific opportunities, but that doesn't justify restrictive policies during other times: Tiny bladders of small children don't work that way. Especially in grade school, it doesn't need to take more than 15-20 minutes to go from "I'm fine" to "I a really need to go". Especially when bathroom privileges are rationed out & tightly controlled and you become hyper aware of your bladder state. I have my two young kids "do a try" in the bathroom before we leave the house for any car ride. That doesn't stop the occasional "I have to go!" 20 minutes into the trip. And sure enough, at the rest stop it's like my kid turned from a 6 year old into an elephant from the amount that comes out of their body.

When & how quickly you develop the need to urinate depends on a lot of factors: Your specific metabolism, recent activity, what you drank and ate, body position, and probably more. And at some point mentally, you simply pass a threshold where one minute you feel no need to go to the bathroom, and the next minute you do. If that "next minute" occurs 10 minutes after lunch break, so what? What is gained by denying that need?

I agree, and it was never an issue to go at other times you just had to ask and not bolt out of the room. It was never denied. They teachers did encourage you to take advantage of the times when you were already out of the room however.

> hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.

This is a fairly reductive statement. Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult. Teachers are [in my country] underpaid and under-appreciated and I believe this kind of rhetoric doesn’t do them justice. People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period, but that seems [anecdotally] to have dropped off since children have returned to regular schooling.

> when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."

Because you were [likely] an adult now who needs to be able to regulate their own behaviours. No surprise here.

The stress level and difficulty of teaching (while accurate statements) are not relevant to this issue. You can't excuse poor treatment of the biological needs of students simply because you have a very difficult job.

My comment was also not a reductive statement when I've been told "no" when I ask to go to the bathroom, or told "3 people have already gone to the bathroom, you'll have to wait until next period."

Both of these specific situations, and variations, happened to me. I watched a classmate pee their pants once when they were denied access to the bathroom.

Want to talk about job stress? Think about the stress an 8 year old goes through when every time they feel their bladder getting full they start worrying about whether they'll be allowed to pee, or have to wait until the next class or recess/lunch, learning nothing in the meantime and hoping they're not the next kid that has to have their parents bring a change of clothes.

I don't know what country you're in. I'm in the US, and quality of pay varies greatly from state to state. Workload (class size) often varies with the socioeconomic status of the people in that school district. What doesn't vary in any conversation I've had with people on this topic is that my experiences are very much not unique.

I may not have been clear with my point that my understanding of the difficulty of teaching in primary (elementary in America?) schools is the children aren’t rationale at that age.

I sympathise with your situation that a child peeing in their pants is not ok under any circumstances. My point was that’s it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to discern between a child copying another’s behaviour and a child in need. This is simply a fact of having 30+ 8 year olds acting as non-rational actors in a classroom setting. This is the point of difference to your original college statement that you could now be considered to act rationally and therefore don’t need to ask permission.

Finally regarding pay, some quick searches show the median income in America to be $60k. My point was that this is indeed undervalued in my opinion when compared to other Industries. You may disagree on that regard, but it’s my opinion understanding what I do about their expected output.

> I watched a classmate pee their pants once when they were denied access to the bathroom.

I wish that had resulted in a lawsuit.

That made me think "Yes, there should be". So I did a quick search and in fact it's not hard to find examples: https://fox5sandiego.com/news/parent-sues-school-after-child...

>People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period

People began to appreciate them for the daycare aspect and not really teaching. The statement might be reductive, but it's also the experience that many kids have with teachers and school.

The right take a toilet break anytime is a very basic human need and right. Why would anybody not extend this without question, to kids. Sure, kids at some point might take advantage, but the magic would wear off very quickly. Is like putting a button infront of someone and saying don't press it, they will really want to, and finally pressing it and being underwhelmed. Is lazy caretaking.

So children shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom at will because teachers are overburdened and underpaid?

> Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult

No surprise it's difficult if you already sour the relationship by treating them poorly and give the kids a reason to hate you from day one. Maybe things will be better if you don't start by making up petty rules that don't help anyone?

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In middle school I remember we had a maths teacher who was very good, in the sense that she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrupting anyone else. This ended up working out well for both sides; those who wanted to learn and engage with the coursework could do so, and those who gave up on it and weren't interested could relax and entertain themselves to make time fly instead of being bored and dreading the class.

In comparison, we had a very severe history teacher, who'd give you spiteful extra assignments (which would escalate further if you didn't do them) if you were lacking in one way or another. Did it help? I don't think so; I remember more about dreading the class and making up excuses/strategies to get away from the class or the assignments than the content of the coursework itself, and I can say for sure that the class was universally hated and dreaded.

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